What do you think of Obama’s ‘clean energy nation’ plan?
The three main components of Obama’s plan are:
— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on
— Require that 10 percent of
—Reduce
“If I am president, I will immediately direct the full resources of the federal government and the full energy of the private sector to a single, overarching goal — in 10 years, we will eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela,” Obama said.
“To do this, we will invest $150 billion over the next 10 years and leverage billions more in private capital to build a new energy economy that harnesses American energy and creates 5 million new American jobs.”
To set an example, Obama is vowing to convert the entire White House fleet to plug-in hybrid vehicles within one year, and convert all federal vehicle purchases to plug-in hybrids or all-electric by 2012.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/2008080…
What do you think of this plan?
One of your answers said that the plan doesn’t address the central problem of “bringing down gas prices.”
The central problem of identifying gas prices as the central problem is that if prices go down, we become complacent and go right back to the consumption levels we had when prices were low before.
I absolutely understand the pain involved in high prices for gasoline, but the energy consumption problem is so much larger than the individual wallet. In traditional economic analysis, we have a tendency to ignore any “costs” that are not bottom line or personal wallet factors. The cost of failing to curb our energy consumption or to change the source of the energy we do consume has been put off to another individual, another country, or even another generation. The generation that will most suffer from the oil based US economy isn’t the generation that established the oil based economy or the one that continued it after the easing of the oil embargoes of the 1970’s.
Another poster said that alternatives will take longer than 4 years and implied that “drilling as the cure” will take fewer than 7. In point of fact, hybrids are on the market now. In point of fact, all electrics like the Volt are scheduled to be available in less than a year and a half.
“What do you think of this plan?”
I don’t have any quick response to the plan because I have not studied it fully yet, but my first impressions are that it is, finally, a serious attempt to wean our nation from the international oil pipeline, and the only serious attempt to address our long-term impact on the world economy and climate. The devil is always in the details, and the problems are extremely complicated, but if we DON”T address the problem and instead continue to attempt to “drill our way out of the problem,” we will get the same impact we got after the last oil shortage scare…and that was more of the same rather than the brilliant solutions we are capable of devising and are in absolute need of devising.
As the saying goes, if you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.
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Easy to say, but much harder to do. Gets lots of applause but just exactly does he plan on accomplishing this? Anyone can say what they would like to do. He might as well say “I’m going to end world hunger and wars within 2 years of my presidency.” Liberals are all about feelings, what they would like to do, like to see happen.
Your last point he made about investing $150 Billion!!!!…invest it where? In what? What does he mean “invest”? If it were profitable for industry to use alternative fuels don’t you think they would have already? Oh…hasn’t he flip-floped again and now he’s in favor of drilling in the